How To Optimize Images For Your Website

One of the most common problems we encounter when taking on the management of a website is very large image file sizes. This not only makes the website very slow to load which is frustrating to visitors but also causes the website to be penalized by Search Engines like Google.

Page load time is now a major ranking factor because it’s considered to provide a bad user experience. Search engines want to provide the best possible user experience and for this reason, they will rank faster loading websites above slower ones.

Last month, we encountered one of the worst examples of this and amazingly the website was brand new. The main image on the front page was almost 3Mb in size and there were other images on the front page also. In the gallery, there were images approaching 5Mb in size.

Why Should You Optimize Images?

Today anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of web design can set up a design company and take your money. It can be a case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. The resulting website has no chance of ranking well in search engines and was frustratingly slow to load which would result in most people “bouncing” away to another faster loading site. This is when learning how to optimize images become essential.

I know that the owner of this brand new resort was focused on the cost. Having spent a small fortune on developing a brand new boutique resort, the last thing to cut corners on to save money is the website to promote it.

Professional web designers focus on trying to get the entire page including images down to just a couple of hundred kilobytes in size for fast load time.

I have created this video tutorial on image optimization that explains the basics of making images web ready. There is more to image optimization from an SEO viewpoint but getting the basics right is a great start, and can make a huge difference to your online visibility.